Explore the Collections

Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections

The most honored British painter of his time, and founder and first president of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768, Joshua Reynolds stood at the vital center of the social and intellectual life of late eighteenth-century London. A renowned portraitist, faithful in descriptive detail but endowing his sitters with rare grace and elevation, he painted the most august and elegant figures of his day. A more tender note entered his art when his subjects were children, whose vulnerable, trusting natures he captured with exquisite sympathy. Here, the result is particularly intimate as the three-year-old boy is the artist's own godson, Henry Edward Bunbury, the second son of dear friends, whose enthralled attention Reynolds captured during their sittings by telling fairy tales. The artist kept the painting by his side all his life. Christopher Riopelle, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 184.

* Works in the collection are moved off view for many different reasons. Although gallery locations on the website are updated regularly, there is no guarantee that this object will be on display on the day of your visit.